Meet the Blogger
Brad Schweers is the Candler Admissions blogger. Hailing from Glenview, Illinois, Brad is the son of Betsy and Dick Schweers and younger brother to Derek. He attended New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois—go Trevians! While perhaps not as famous as fellow New Trier alumni Rahm Emmanuel, Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, Donald Rumsfeld, or Rainn Wilson (Dwight from “The Office”), Brad is pretty sure he holds the freshman baseball B-team single season record for stolen bases by a catcher (60 something?) and steals of home (at least 10).
Brad attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where he became interested in psychology and received his Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies. Brad focused his studies primarily on the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but has subsequently become very interested in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. He is particularly interested in comparative religion, mythology, psychology of religion and religious experience and social change.
Perhaps the three weeks that shaped Brad’s later life more than any others were those he spent in Bosnia and Herzegovina in August of 1996. That summer Brad’s life and faith were wonderfully and disconcertingly shaken to their foundations. The four-year Bosnia War had ended in December of 1995 and The United Methodist Church had set up a number of Youth Houses in Bosnia where children affected by the war could reconnect with what it is to be a kid—playing chess, table tennis, and basketball, learning English and computer skills, and just having fun. Brad went with a United Methodist Committee on Relief group in conjunction with the United Nations, to the Youth House in Travnik, where he danced the Macarena with the kids, played a lot of chess and basketball, sipped on Turkish coffee at Cafe Bobby Fisher, and drank the local pivo (beer).
In Bosnia, Brad experienced constant and irreconcilable contradictions. Travnik and Sarajevo are beautiful towns, set in picturesque alpine mountains. And yet they were burned and torn by war. The buildings and roads and mosques were riddled with bullet-holes and battered unlike anything Brad had ever seen. And yet locals were constantly overjoyed, hugging long-lost friends in the streets, tears running onto each others shoulders as they discovered that each had survived the war. Brad met Muslim nurses who had run out onto the battlefields to save wounded soldiers with little concern for their own safety and no concern for the religious affiliation of the fallen soldier. Brad saw that the Muslims were the only ones in town acting out of the love and courage that Jesus talked about (Matthew 25). He stayed with a Muslim family and worshiped with Muslims at a local mosque. He learned powerfully that he had shrunken the imminent-and-yet-transcendent God into a tiny, sectarian god of the “Christian” clan, far different from the God of Jesus whose love was boundless and whose grace broke through the religious, ethnic, and gender barriers of the time.
Brad forewent seminary after college in order to serve as a United Methodist US-2 domestic missionary. Brad served at Café 458 here in Atlanta for three years, all the while living in the Community of Hospitality, an intentional community of volunteers with shared values of spirituality, simple living, and social justice. After three more years in social services, seminary called once again and Brad attended Candler to get his Master of Theological Studies. Brad’s favorite writers/theologians are Friederich Schleiermacher, Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman, and Søren Kierkegaard and his favorite architect is Frank Lloyd Wright.
Today, Brad works as an Admissions Advisor at Candler while cultivating his loves for woodworking, Ultimate, gardening, and other forms of beauty.